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therufus writes "Sweden's Supreme Court announced its decision not to grant leave to appeal in the long-running Pirate Bay criminal trial. This means that the previously determined jail sentences and fines handed out to Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Carl Lundström will stand."

So what if i download some Michael Jackson or John Lennon music or how about the game L.A Noire. Am i hurting the artists who are dead or the game studio which is shut , where is the harm to the artist here ?

Copyright is evil because it puts a monopoly on culture. I'll argue that if older material were released to the public domain as the founders intended, there would be more than enough free material to bring down piracy on newer creations.
People pirate the new stuff because the old stuff has been out of print for so long (which benefits no one), they've forgotten about it. Put it in the public domain rather than let it gather dust.

> Monitoring "every single" thing on every site is impossible
How wrong you are. I suggest you read up about "Lawful Intercept" (which is as backward a term as you can get). The US Feds (FBI,NSA) can watch the world's traffic in real-time thanks to trade laws they have that require friendly non-US countries to install Lawful Intercept gear in their ISPs. The data is then squirreled away in their colossal data farms. What used to be impossible now is completely possible. Plus, many first world countries store the IP traffic that passes their borders. It wouldn't surprise me if this was shared (in the same way signal intelligence is shared via the ECHELON network). Do some Googling about those keywords I've mentioned. Oh, yeah, and welcome to 1984 for real.

IIf at some point in the future some genius invents a device that allows us to make copies of things for free, I would support people's right to do just that.

We are working on it ( http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Global_Village_Construction_Set [opensourceecology.org] ), but it will not be a single device, at least not in the near term. It will be an "ecology" of devices that will make parts for each other. That is because ceramics, metals, plastic, wood, etc. generally need different processing techniques, and it's not easy to put that all into one device. But nothing stops you from having a large workshop with various machines, and then a robot does the assembly at the end, and have it all driven by a single 3D object file.

As a practical matter, there will always be some parts you have to buy. For example, you won't be replicating what intel does in it's factories any time soon. But you can place bought parts on storage shelves for the assembly robot to grab when it needs them. What needs doing is lots of grunt level design and programming to make the "ecology" as closed-loop as possible and minimize the bought items.

The stuff about an open Internet is 50%genuine principles, and 50% a pompous rationalization from greedy geeks who want free copies.

Ignoring the 'greedy' part, which is a gratuitous characterisation, yes, emphatically yes. I want free copies. It's called sharing; you might have heard about it.

What people who bitch about piracy never adequately explain, when they're busy deriding the so-called pirates, is why according to this report [thehill.com] at least, widespread copying is actually making things better for said writers/musicians/artists/designers/videographers. Even the content distributors (who are the ones we're really talking about when we mention SOPA/PIPA/ACTA) are profiting more than they ever have [matadornetwork.com], deriving more 65% of their revenues from technologies they swore would kill them.

Sharing is a public good; everyone from Jesus to Hobbes to RMS[*] has espoused this principle. And you know what kind of person is most likely to share? The ones with the least. I live in a Least Developed Country, and the generousity shown here makes society in North America look absolutely sick.

And yet here we have the so-called content owners, who insist on transfer of authorship before they'll even consider distributing your material, telling me I can't have a working Internet because I wanted someone else to listen to a song? Imprisoning people just because they want to help me share? Fuck that.

And before you dare call me selfish or a thief, and before you accuse me of taking crumbs from the mouth of the poor, starving artist: I get paid to write, code and take photos, and yet I still manage to give almost all of that output away. If I can do it, then so can others. The plain fact is that others are thriving in this gift economy. The only ones who aren't are those complacent, sclerotic few who think that artificial scarcity is valid economics. Well, as far as I'm concerned, they can go rot.

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[*] Okay, visually that's not much of a gamut, but you get my point...

Essentially, the pirate bay is in the wrong because they encourage piracy. It's as simple as that. It's the artists' right not to have their works copied, and the pirate bay has built their living around robbing them of this right. It is completely within their interests to make the problem significantly worse, especially given that it has earned them multiple millions so far. Almost every single dollar made so far has been at the expense of someone else's hard work.

I like to think of them as a documentary film-maker filming the exploits of a serial killer. He watches, and profits from, every kill made. The serial killer will ask him about the locations of certain individual, and the film-maker will happily oblige him (after all, he wasn't to know they'd necessarily be butchered, right?). In fact, if anyone pulled the film-maker up on this behaviour, he would simply cite the many times the killer asked for the nearest petrol station or convenience store, painting himself as a dumb source of information that couldn't be held responsible for how the serial killer used his information. But, in the end, he knows exactly how the serial killer will use the information, and every time he commits another heinous crime, it's more money in the film-maker's bank.

When the film-maker is finally placed in jail where he belongs (but the killer escapes justice), the serial killer turns to this nice guy at an information kiosk (let's call him, say, Google). His job is to hand out lots of information to lots of people. The serial killer asks him about various locations of people and places, and he happily obliges, the same as he would any other customer. Google is aware that a serial killer is on the loose, but he has no more reason to suspect one person over another, and so instead of stopping (or severely restricting) service to everyone, he decides to keep his job and just deliver people what they ask for. Google may have aided the serial killer many times, but unlike the film-maker, Google really is just a dumb source of information. He has as much reason to believe the information he provides will be used for the benefit of everyone, rather than to murder people, and this is the source of his income. His position is perfectly morally justifiable.